The volume of data that must be stored by individuals, organizations, businesses and government is growing every year. In addition to just keeping up with demand, organizations face other storage challenges. With the move to on-line, real-time business and government, critical data must be protected from loss or inaccessibility due to software or hardware failure. Today, many storage products do not provide complete failure protection and expose users to the risk of data loss or unavailability. For example, many storage solutions on the market today offer protection against some failure modes, such as processor failure, but not against others, such as disk drive failure. Many organizations are exposed to the risk of data loss or data unavailability due to component failure in their data storage system.
The data storage market is typically divided into two major segments, i.e., Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and Network Storage. DAS includes disks connected directly to a server.
Network Storage includes disks that are attached to a network rather than a specific server and can then be accessed and shared by other devices and applications on that network. Network Storage is typically divided into two segments, i.e., Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Network Attached Storage (NAS).
A SAN is a high-speed special-purpose network (or subnetwork) that interconnects different kinds of data storage devices with associated data servers on behalf of a larger network of users. Typically, a SAN is part of the overall network of computing resources for an enterprise. A storage area network is usually clustered in close proximity to other computing resources but may also extend to remote locations for backup and archival storage, using wide area (WAN) network carrier technologies.
NAS is hard disk storage that is set up with its own network address rather than being attached to the local computer that is serving applications to a network's workstation users. By removing storage access and its management from the local server, both application programming and files can be served faster because they are not competing for the same processor resources. The NAS is attached to a local area network (typically, an Ethernet network) and assigned an IP address. File requests are mapped by the main server to the NAS file server.
All of the above share one common feature that can be an Achilles tendon in more ways than one, i.e., data is stored on a physical medium, such as a disk drive, CD drive, and so forth.